Accessibility

I used three tools to evaluate and analyze the accessibility of my portfolio. The first I used was the Velet Webthing Site to analyze my portfolio. I was surprised by the poor rating my portfolio received. It also took me some time to figure out what exactly it all meant! My lowest rating was for “Bogus or deprecated markup” which had 64 links to errors. After a bit of research, I found that bogus and deprecated markups is an “element or attribute is one that has been outdated by newer constructs. Deprecated elements may become obsolete in future versions of HTML.”( Web Accessibility Images , 1999).

Using the Web Accesiblity Checklist adapted from Educourse, there were several areas of concerns. One was “Can the Application be used with only the keyboard?” My portfolio relies on a lot of mousework, clicking on menu options and going from page to page. Although in theory, one could choose an option and ten use the arrow keys to manipulate, I would need to test this using just a keyboard to see if it was possible. I tied this and just using the arrow keys I was able to quite successfully navigate from one menu to another by going up and down, but for some reason, I could not move the pointer from left to right. I also wasn’t sure how to actually select an item using just the keyboard! I’m used to using the mouse for so much of the selection, manipulation, and mobility, it was admittedly frustrating experience and I’m not quite sure how to fix it. The second item from this checklist was “When styling and layout is removed, is the document understandable?” I feel that a lot does rely on layout and without it, it would just be a lot of text. The layout helps keep items visually organized and break up items.

The third tool that I used to evaluate my portfolio the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool. It came up with six errors, eight alerts and twelve contrast errors. The six errors included one linked imgae not missing alternative text, one empty heading, and four empty links. The alerts included one skipped heading level, three broken same page link, and one redundant link.

Out of these three tools, I felt the WAVE analysis was most helpful because it showed on the actual page in the portfolio where the error was. The Valet site showed the number of errors, but it was scripted where the errors were and I found that hard to interpret. Changes I will be making to my blog include fixing links and getting rid of empty links. One aspect I realized was that since I have multiple pages in my portfolio, the WAVE analysis instead of analyzing the whole site only analyzed the direct link I entered, which was the home page.